"Two weeks later on 20 January, Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were arrested in Coatesville, New Zealand by the New Zealand Police, in an armed raid on Dotcom's house involving 76 officers and two helicopters. Seized assets included eighteen luxury cars, large TVs, works of art and US$175 million in cash. Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide[...]"
No one legit has 175MM in cash sitting around. That's the realm of dictators and drug lords.
In general "That's really unusual behavior" shouldn't be enough to forfeit a fortune.
I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits, packing boxes at hypersonic speeds for 60 hours per day without rest. Obviously, he makes $2M/hr because their labor is worth $25/hr or more and he diverts the excess for himself.
Like it or not, but if he would do anything illegal other than "copyright violation" of US companies he'll surely be in prison in New Zealand a long time ago.
Soviet Union (1922-1991):
- Political repression, Gulag system, and forced labor
- Economic inefficiencies and consumer goods shortages
- Suppression of religious and cultural freedoms
- Estimated deaths: 10-20 million (including famines, purges, and Gulag deaths)
China under Mao (1949-1976):
- Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution chaos
- Suppression of intellectuals and traditional culture
- Collectivization and economic mismanagement
- Estimated deaths: 30-60 million (primarily from Great Chinese Famine)
Cambodia under Khmer Rouge (1975-1979):
- Forced labor and "return to year zero" policies
- Extreme social engineering and intellectual purges
- Near-total economic collapse
- Estimated deaths: 1.5-3 million (Cambodian Genocide)
North Korea (1948-present):
- Extreme political repression and personality cult
- Severe economic hardship and technological backwardness
- International isolation
- Estimated deaths: 240,000-3.5 million (1990s famine), 400,000+ in prison camps
Ethiopia under the Derg (1974-1991):
- Red Terror campaign of political repression
- Economic mismanagement leading to famine
- Civil war and ethnic conflicts
- Estimated deaths: 430,000-1.75 million (famine and Red Terror combined)
Cuba (1959-present):
- Political repression and limits on personal freedoms
- Economic hardships, especially post-Soviet support
- Mass exodus of citizens
- Estimated deaths: 3,000-4,000 (political executions)
Venezuela (under Chavez and Maduro, 1999-present):
- Economic collapse and hyperinflation
- Widespread shortages of food and medicine
- Erosion of democratic institutions
- Deaths: Difficult to quantify, but increased mortality due to shortages
East Germany (1949-1990):
- Stasi surveillance and political repression
- Restrictions on personal freedoms and travel
- Economic stagnation compared to West Germany
- Estimated deaths: 327 killed at Berlin Wall, thousands in prisons
Romania under Ceaușescu (1965-1989):
- Severe austerity measures and poverty
- Brutal suppression of dissent
- Disastrous social engineering policies
- Estimated deaths: 10,000-15,000 (political repression)
Vietnam (1975-present):
- Initial period of harsh re-education and collectivization
- Suppression of political dissent
- Economic hardships until later reforms
- Estimated deaths: 165,000 in re-education camps, tens of thousands in land reform
Basically it's now non-democratic country with wild capitalism.
... My assumption is that you believe, and above is all evidence pointing in this direction, that Marxism leads to malevolent dictatorships.
Whilst the example of the actions above aren't literal examples of what Marx espouses, they're the end result of societies that have attempted to pursue Marxist ideals. Emergent behaviour.
To be ridiculously reductionist, if Capitalism gets us Epstein and Communism gets us the stats you've provided, I know what I'd choose for my family (hint: being alive beats any alternative).
"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists." - communist manifesto
I don't think that all of them were malevolent either. Most of them probably thought that it would work, and that the end justifies whatever means, or that suffering is necessary for the reward in the end.
I'm going to noodle over that distinction of natural capitalism versus forced socialism.
I'm thinking along the lines of family-level (and maybe extended to friends and family / cooperative small village) socialism is natural, but on a societal level, of the scales we see today, capitalism is natural. Cooperation versus competition. Very interesting.
Capitalism doesn't mean competition over co-operation. It simply means that you don't have to co-operate if you don't get equal rewards, or if you don't get rewards proportional to your effort. People hate to co-operate if someone else gets the rewards. People love to co-operate if they get a fair share of the rewards, which is what happens under capitalism.
Owning stuff leads to trading and markets, which leads to the law of supply and demand and the price system. Just by looking at prices of things, people can make rational decisions about what to produce and what to consume. People are pushed to produce things that are scarce and expensive, and they are pushed to consume things that are abundant and cheap. This is a form of self-organized co-operation, where everyone co-operates automatically by just acting rationally. By looking out for themselves, they help allocate resources for the whole community. The lack of this mechanism is one of the major reasons why totalitarian socialism fails. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
What does it have to do with capitalism? People like that or much worse thrive in non democratic states with no rule of law and absolutely no public transparency (e.g. Beria). It's just we don't really get to hear about them..
Bezos and Musk provided more value to society than one of their employees.
The convenience of Amazon wouldn't exist and it saved normal people a ridiculous amount of man-hours.
If you contributed something more valuable to the world you could also get more than $1M for your lifetime.
That's now how it works though. Someone with an iq of 101 isn't 1% more valuable than someone iq100. A man can easily be worth 10,000 times more with an iq of 150 than some average shlob.
> it's far more reasonable to assume that he assigned the value of the efforts of others to himself, stole, manipulated, scammed, or otherwise acquired that $175M illegitimately.
Easy, sure. Reasonable? No, it isn't. He wasn't phishing Grandma's facebook to get her to send him her life's savings. He had a service that other people wanted to use, they paid him for it. None of them complained that he wasn't providing the service. One user even sued the US government, claiming they seized his own personal documents when they seized the servers (had no backups of it). Quite a few were using it in ways most would consider legitimate.
> I feel the same about Musk's or Bezos' mind-boggling fortunes; Jeff isn't making $2M per hour while his exhausted employees make $16/hr (while peeing in bottles on a breakneck pace through the warehouse) because he's foregoing all human needs and limits,
Jeff Bezos was never making $2mil/hour at all. This is what happens when your economics education consisted of a dozen r/latestagecapitalism meme pictures.
Jeff Bezos famously had an $80,000 salary. I make more than that, and I'm a loser. The rest of you are probably making x2 or x3 as much, maybe more. He had assets of many millions of shares of stock, with an estimated worth of many billions depending on share price on any given day. It'd be like claiming you make $750,000/hr because your home's worth that much (according to Zillow, and only until you try to sell it and find out it's quite a bit less).
Remember: he's not being charged just for copyright infringement. If he was, then freezing his assets would be unusual. He's being charged with money laundering and racketeering, two crimes that involve illegal flows of money.
This video of Kim is a classic (I think it came out origianlly c. 2009). The last shot of his table with a stack of Gold Bars in the middle is very revealing (or maybe moreso is his Rolls Royce with the plate "GOD")....
"At only 1.5 years of age, (kims kid) is already at the top of most xbox leaderboards." What??
His bodyguards are picked out by a Kung Fu master?? This is so ridiculously cliche. Nobody serious about their security would hire Kung Fu martial artists to train their team. I train a bunch of martial arts (boxing, muay thai, bjj, hapkido) and I would never use something like kung fu in a tussle. I've got 16yo junior amateur boxers that could probably knock that kung fu master out in a single hit.
Gold bricks are here https://youtu.be/A4TXAaqmj0E?t=365
I wonder what the threshold is for assets worth seizing. Anything under about 100” is going to cost more to seize than it’s worth. If the kitchen is full of AllClad do they seize the cookware?
Feds seem to be a bit more discriminating, tending towards larger amounts of cash, bullion, vehicles, and real estate. But I've seen more than a few news articles over the years where they seized property you might call petty.
I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US. If nothing else, it has a paper trail, right?
> I get that there’s a lot of corruption, but “nice GameBoy, my kid’ll love it after auction” seems like a stretch even for the US.
Choose to believe or not, matters not to me. But I would point you at the many mainstream news articles of places that make road trips through where the local police shake people down for valuables, and the many corvettes and sports cars painted in black and white that cops drive as squad cars. Are these confiscating those because they make such good vehicles for hauling people away to the holding cell?
The people using the word to say that Kimmy D isn't smallfolk don't even understand the vocabulary they favor.
How would you do it?
You don’t have to feel sorry for the film studios of course, I’m not crying for them either. But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
I do. What's indicated here is an overabundance of pricing power on the film studios' side, which is a direct result of laws and policies that were designed to benefit and advantage businesses over labor (for a variety of reasons, some justifiable and some not). You want to cast this as a natural and organic process when it's anything but; if it were, the skill ceiling involved in the trade and returns from movie sales would likely have topped out at a more appropriate point vis a vis wages. That is, the fact that these CG-heavy films are making more money than ever, and that VFX is incredibly difficult to break into because of the high skill required, and wages are still low, and VFX studios are still going under, suggests that wages are being artificially depressed.
>But I still think there’s a difference between pirating movies and having an advantageous position in a job market.
Nah. It's a case of filthy-rich scammers getting scammed by a filthy rich scammer. Their bad behavior, at the very least, helps to legitimize exploitation (popularly, if not so much legally). But I think it goes further than that. The depressed wages of labor and concentration of capital in the hands of elite executives and business owners has helped to shape the socioeconomic status quo, where so many consumers simply can't afford to purchase film tickets and media the way that they used to be able to, but also where the pressure to participate in pop culture and consume content is stronger than ever. The result is that people are willing to access this content however they can, creating an opportunity for hustlers like Kim.
Obviously, the solution is to dismantle many of the policy benefits that let big businesses exploit workers, and to break up the capital accretion that allowed them to capture policy in the first place. Dismantle the economic distortions that led us here.
But if Hollywood execs are scamming the people whose labor makes their whole venture possible in the first place, that's worth expending energy on. Hence, again, the strikes.
Definitely not "small folk like us".
If he was a drug lord or if he was even remotely connected to malicious security services he would have been long taken by force. New Zealand is a close US ally.
How do you explain this part then:
> Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen, denying him access to 64 bank accounts world-wide
Can you explain why we should be fixated with how much money he has or how he stores his money wrt the criminal case being prosecuted? If there was something there wouldnt they have revealed it in their accusations years ago?
I was just pointing out the irony in your comment where you just assert that it was perfect in line with is character to have ALL is money in cash while literally the next line says he has 64 bank accounts scattered all over the globe.
Feels like we are being a bit pedantic.
Not that that justifies anything, people should be free to keep as much physical cash as they want.
Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside of the modern banking system if you are against the US.
But no matter how big/small he is, I don't approve of other countries extraditing their citizens to the US for things they did while physically outside the US. Especially when the US wouldn't do the same when it comes to its citizens.
He created a site where you can upload anything with complete privacy and anonymity. And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts. The RIAA/MPAA want their pound of flesh, too, and it gave plenty of fertile ground for the US DOJ to build a case around so that they could get discovery and find out what they were really trying to get access to. But the piracy is not the point; not by a long shot.
As with anything that allows absolute anonymity AND absolute privacy, it's bound to attract bad actors. Yes, the "pirate music" types. But ALSO the "sell humans" and "provide criminal services (hitman/fraud agent/patsy agreement/etc)" types.
Dotcom can turn blind eyes all he wants, but if won't take responsibility for the damage he is facilitating, it is in the public interest for him to be held accountable against his will.
I'll never stop pirating media, and I'd never want a media pirate to go to jail. But I'll never defend a human trafficker either, no matter how "innocent" they allow themselves to remain via intentional ignorance.
Great, sounds like a dream to avoid dirty hands of USA/China/UK/... regimes
MPAA/RIAA needing to be saved from racketeering is epic levels of irony
Wait, where did that come from? Did Kim Dotcom facilitate human trafficking?
Using the strictest logic, you should not take my word for it. Maintain a healthy skepticism that human trafficking was ever facilitated via Dotcom's enterprises. I have not provided any direct evidence that anything like that was going on and, as stated, I'm not in a position to. Everyone is more than welcome to believe that nothing more untoward than media piracy was going on in a world-renown, legally-battle-tested, completely anonymous, completely private marketplace of data.
I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that, seems relatively minor in the grand scale of things, but he was hardly "just sharing songs on the internet".
Let's just call it how it is: USA dictatorship. Just imagine the comments if China/Russia did this stuff
In this case, he annoyed powerful IP owners, and those people in our current society are as powerful as they get.
That's 2 orders of magnitude up the resources invested.
And not even for stealing in the case of Mega, but for assumed money people would have paid to IP owners if the service hadn't existed. Which is a premise pirates have been debunking for years.
When I used mega, I didn't have the money for the content. Today I pay for netflix and steam games.
This is not about justice, this is about power.
"Long time" is subjective.
> I don't necessarily agree you should be taken away from your home-country because of that
New Zealand doesn't agree either, it's not on the short list of crime categories that one can be extradited for. I seem to remember a headline from a decade ago where the US charges were amended to try to sidestep that. When the exact crimes one is accused of are subject to modification to squirm around protections, maybe the people prosecuting are worse than those being prosecuted.
Whether you think the particular laws are ethical or not, if you publicly break them, they will catch up with you.
Actually to that end he got millions in cash facilitating piracy of movies/tv/software
Yes, the belief is that the source of his wealth was from MegaUpload and Mega.
But, I misspoke--the point I intended to make is that MU was making far more from download users than upload users. I made it sound like subs weren't a part of that, but they were. It's a question of what they were actually paying for.
Technically the subscriptions were paying for storage, but the indictment also cites MUs on database as showing only 5 million out of 60+ million registered users ever uploaded anything.
I mean, is it really a file sharing service if the vast majority of your paying customers don't share any files?
I mean she doing gods work on making science more open to everyone, but if she were living in New Zealand she would land in US prison for 10+ years long ago.
This same foreign country who passed laws for invading the hague if they came under trial for crimes in the ICC.
[1]: See assange's bid for first amendment's guarantees when the same foreign country was trying to extradite and "trial" him
...that is a summary of Kim's trial. Movie companies own the government.
IP holder damages should take in consideration what the actual buying power of pirates is, not just multiply downloads by dvd costs, and copyright laws need a huge reform.
He's a modern day robin hood, people would prefer him to win over eg. disney... and disney is not doing itself a favour these days :)
>He's a modern day robin hood
He's run or partnered on multiple pump-and-dumps for the better part of 30 years, some of which capitalized on his fanbase.
I'm not going to defend the guy because he has been involved in a number of shady dealings, but this does seem like an extraordinary amount of effort to go after a guy who ran a website that facilitated pirating of music and movies over a decade ago.
Yep, especially compared to other people, who did worse (pedophillia-wise), like Polansky, etc.
Yeah and there is Logan Paul living in US running pump and dumps, scams and other things. But he look nice and popular so he'll continue to do it without any prosecution. As well as many other YouTube personalities. After all they pay taxes to US so they can do it freely.
Again, not protecting Dotcom or like him as person, but he is not some war criminal to justify this kind of effort US put into trying to get him.
We're talking about software and (well, mostly) media piracy, movies and music here.
Depending on the content, it is.
> He's a modern day robin hood
Robin Hood didn't enrich himself with the stolen goods.
Do you mean "would be paid"? But why would anyone pay the users? The uploaders were paid.
> The "theft" is propaganda.
No, it's juridical fact.
> In fact from the article itself it even says Mega had a notice and takedown system available to the rights holders.
Where does it say this? Anyway, this system was bullocks. It was just a poor lip service which they stalled and ignored the whole time.
"copyright holders, industry representatives, and legislators have long characterized copyright infringement as piracy or theft – language which some U.S. courts now regard as pejorative or otherwise contentious."
And also I'm unsure there is evedence it was ignored, it just seems like you are spewing more copyright propaganda. Might I dare to say they might be in fact lying?
Is everyone you don't like a Russian spy?
Kim Dotcom, the Critical Thinker, does. But he curiously suspends critical thinking when pandering idiotic conspiracy theories about biolabs weaponizing birds. Gotta love these selective critical thinkers.
I weep for this world.
Equating it to possible Trump Russia connections however has nothing to do with the article.
As other comments noted, the man literally made millions distributing copyrighted material, while completely aware of what he was doing.
Kim is a modern day robin hood. Illegal, criminal, yada yada? Sure. Is he "bad" for the people? Well... that's very debatable.
"What is motivating you to simp for the empire so hard?" is not such a question. Having been in such conversations before, if I responded with an honest answer like "I generally think the US is a pretty good country" or "I feel that it's important for criminals to be caught and punished", I'm quite confident that the original commenter would respond with personal insults and invective.
Fuck MPAA/RIAA. They're not good faith actors and they play dirty all the time. We need to fight dirty too. It's so rich of those guys to complain of racketeering of all things!
Being on Russian payroll is not a criminal offense, there are plenty of RT-affiliated journalists who still operate in the West.
And BTW since when has Kim any legit political stance? It has always been about money and fame for Kim. Political topics were never a serious part of him.
No, they did not. User abused the platform, and the companies removed it when notified. Kim didn't do that, instead he even made a business of it. Youtube especially had a historical case about this, when they were sued by Viacom(?) for not removing content well enough, which then resulted in the creation of the contentId-system. This was BTW around 5 years before MegaUpload and Kim were raided.
And as you mentioned ChatGPT, AI and content-usage is a completely different story, and a recent problem around loopholes in the existing laws. Maybe the companies will also be sued for this, maybe not, we will see..
how come musk did it with 80% people fired why wasnt it adressed before? would you send the previous twitter ceo to jail?
I understand when leaders in politics or industry make these character-assasination attacks as they do it for their own interests (political or economical) but why do you do it? Why would normal people throw baseless accusations like this? What is your motivation? What skin do you have in this game? Is your argument really "Kim Dotcom is an agent because he is opposing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and he is against a forever war in Ukraine"?
He is presumably some guy that youve never met that happens to be fighting against the US government and its copyright laws so why are you making these comments? Are you so passionate about copyrights because you are an artist that has lost money because of mega? What motivates you?
Thanks for articulating this, similar idea behind my sibling comment. Sadly i think the conclusion is that the vast majority of people are small minded, spiteful, and more or less accept whatever narrative the empire feeds them. Wish it wasn't like this
So you can't hate or dislike the USA dictatorship on your own? Only small minded people can think so?
I just seriously doubt that likes of Dotcom, Musk or Trump need to be on Putin payroll. They just all have their own agenda to sell "strong russia, good putin" narrative.
And "because he tweeted on X"?
I think you're going to need something a bit more substantive than that.
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
Its like Americans complaining about how Chinese or Indian hit movies are covertly pro-Chinese or pro-Indian propaganda pieces. Ever heard of Hollywood?
Hailing from a country that joined NATO in the 90s I wouldn't brand a person arguing this as being on communist payroll - just ignorant beyond measure.
Russia has been a consistently bad neighbour for decades now and I for one am happy that in my country it was the post-communists out of everyone who spearheaded the effort to have a deterrent in the form of NATO membership.
Finland and Sweden appear to agree, considering how they joined the alliance.
If anything, NATO is now more relevant than ever.
Also wrt to Finland -- if anything the story of Finland ascension into NATO supports the arguments that NATO is intentionally -- and aggressively -- pushing Russia to war. Finland has had close relations with NATO for years and during the same period Ukraine was more or less under the influence of Russia. So why havent the Russians cooked up some story about the Finns abusing ethnic Russians and invaded Finland a while back? Could it be that the Russians are sincere in their concerns that Ukraine hosting NATO troops is a matter of national security for them?
The world is being pushed towards nuclear war. And for what exactly? A Ukrainian government that has refused to engage with its neighbor on topics that its neighbor claims are matters critical to its national security while enthusiastically engaging with war mongering nations abroad on weapon deals that bring little value to the people of Ukraine. What would have been better for Ukraine? To find a way to make peace with Russia or to fight it for a decade? And please dont say this is for "democracy", "freedom", and "liberty". Who believes that the US and Europe is pumping tens of billions of dollars of military hardware to Ukraine monthly out of altruism?
I think people dont realize that the Russians are a super power. At some point they will lose self control and it will be a loss for mankind.
What's to say Russia won't wave the nuke card again, and again, if it worked the first time?
Also, do you ascribe any agency to the people of Ukraine? If they want to resist Russia, let them, I say.
And of course it's not out of altruism. (Well, some of the icing on the cake may be.)
It's because Russia is changing the status quo. That's a threat to the US. (And many other countries!)
Look: the Russian invasion sucks for everybody involved and in particular the Russian and Ukrainian civilians. War might be good for many things but at the very least it is not obviously good for politics. I think it’s not controversial to expect that Russian leadership would have much preferred to develop influence through significant mutually beneficial relations with its neighbors.
What is to be done however if at some point a third party with infinite resources is those neighbors to an impasse on topics of national security to Russia? And after this those third parties start arming those neighbors with advanced weapon systems? Exactly what do you expect the US would do in a similar situation?
People wishing that the war would stop are not simply siding with an invader or a bully. They are being practical and recognizing a legitimate grievance of the Russians. Unless your position is that we live in a world where nations are unequal wrt security expectations you have to acknowledge the reality that the Russians have a legitimate claim to be upset about.
This is completely false. "NATO encroachment" is a VERY recent talking point which is part of the neo-fascist narrative that Russia developed attempting to excuse its own inadequacies. You should google Foundations of Geopolitics which is basically a Russian version of Mein Kampf. This book is required reading for majority of Russian politicians, diplomats and high ranking military officials. Before Russia decided that it wanted to pursue a fascist state, NATO was not on its agenda at all.
This is completely false.
> neo-fascist narrative
Azov brigade?
In the U.K people are currently being jailed for years for mild social media posts. Hopefully the Axis of resistance will liberate the West. This American certainly hopes so.
Greater free speech huh? Let's see shall we:
72-year-old Russian woman sentenced to 5 years in prison for anti-war posts on social media [1] https://therecord.media/russian-woman-sentenced-to-prison-ov...
A Russian American Is Sentenced in Russia Over Social Media Posts [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/world/europe/russian-amer...
US-Russian dual national jailed for 12 years on treason charges for $52 donation to Ukraine [3] https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/international/ap-us-russ...
Russian man whose daughter made anti-war painting sentenced to two years in prison [4] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/28/europe/russian-man-sentenced-...
>This American certainly hopes so.
Press X for doubt on this one :)
Would you like to reconsider who has greater free speech rights?
American as apple pie. You're a hacker, see where the IP I'm commenting from is located. What hubris to think millions of Americans aren't completely fed up with this fascist empire. If you're still unsure, for 20 years now Congressional approval hasn't cracked 30%.
Are you talking about this stochastic terrorist who incited riots and called for the murder of hundreds of innocent people? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/14/woma...
If yes, I think you are utterly delusional at this point.
Terms like "stochastic terrorism" are just linguistic tricks to fool the population into voluntarily relinquishing their civil rights.
Claiming that Russia has greater free speech right is laughable. Maybe if you compare to North Korea...
Don't get me wrong, the United States wants the same for its citizens but our annoying Bill of Rights and Supreme Court have slowed the descent into tyranny.
One thing seems certain to me: we were never free. Those in power will do as they please. Here or in Russia it’s all the same.
Russia has its interests. It puts them above human rights. We have our interests and guess what we do the same.
Need I remind you that we fabricated reasons to invade Vietnam and Iraq and in the process we killed millions of civilians? Or do you need a list of all the governments we admit to have toppled over the years?
Our misguided belief that we occupy some moral high ground is objectively making the world a worse place. By our hands and by the fact that we are enabling other countries to act the same (eg Iran and Russia). How about instead we concretely define principles and standards that we apply uniformly? Why do we have to pretend like we are uniquely act with impunity on the global stage?
As for the NATO enlargement narrative I don't know why people still try to push this when it's clear as water that Russia wants to annex more and more territory, even their conditions for ceasefire are mostly about Ukraine ceding territory to Russia.
And are you saying NATO can’t be enlarging because Russia wants to annex territory so that means NATO hasn’t been enlarging?
Its regime is exactly that delusional, yes.
Super power that cannot defend it's own borders during the hot war. I guess their superpower army too busy conquering Moon and Mars or far away galaxy.
And you know what's not happened when Ukraine started to capture Russia territory? Putin and his gang said nothing at all about nuclear weapons during last 10 days. Not even single hint even though he like to talk about them every time when his ass not in danger.
This is because they are criminals and bullies and these kind of people only understand force.
> A Ukrainian government that has refused to engage with its neighbor on topics that its neighbor claims are matters critical to its national security
If the "matters critical to its national security" involve unprovoked invading of other country, then it's good they don't care, even assuming your biased rhetoric has anything close to reality.
Thanks for bringing up the example.
MAD prevented WW3. What do you think happens if the US thinks it can cause significantly more harm to China and Russia through first strikes?
There's no evidence for the existence of such a plan.
And (prior to the invasion) there wasn't even an active plan to bring Ukraine into NATO. It was taken firmly off the table in 2008.
It's just a dictator lying to you, and his own people. It's what they do for breakfast.
This really shouldn't come as any kind of a surprise.
So what your are saying is a falsehood based on the current realities on the ground.
Which, specifically?
I suppose any of the thousands of regular aircraft that Ukraine has "could" deliver a nuclear payload. But that would be a pretty stupid way to launch a first strike, and doesn't change the MAD equation in any way.
It's incredible the convoluted things people tell themselves to explain away the simple and obvious reality:
The only reason Finland and Sweden joined NATO was because Russia invaded Ukraine and started a genocide, while threatening Finland and Sweden with the same (and nukes).
The option is to let Russia freely commit genocide with rape, murder, and terrorism.
Only to then steer their target to the next country and do exactly the same.
I see you've never seen Estonia or Latvia on a map. Nor realize NATO is already there. Why have they not been invaded while since 2008, Georgia and Ukraine have? Total mystery.
You are just parroting lies manufactured by russian propaganda. Here you go, read it from the source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598
Also don't you dare make them lose their temper.
Russia isn't under threat from NATO, as it's a defensive alliance. They seem to understand that as well, as they pulled their air defense systems from the region bordering Finland.
> I think people dont realize that the Russians are a super power.
The soviet union was a super power. If anything people realised that Russia's supposed power is mainly posturing.
And it was high time for that. In the past some western governments attempted a policy of appeasement - all it achieved was emboldening Russia.
Russia pop 145 million. GDP 2.24 Trillion.
Brazil, pop 205 million, GDP 1.92 Trillion.
Brazil isn't anyone's idea of a super power. Difference is Russia has or had a lot of Soviet cold war era weapons and weapons manufacturing. With the emphasis on the increasingly had.
So yes you are right. And I agree about the wife beater logic.
I don’t expect them to stop fighting invaders. But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity. They didn’t. Why I wonder?
This is a lot like asking, in regard to events of August 1939 -- "Do you deny that Poland has ethnic Germans in it territory"?
Of course it did, and in fact (though this is largely forgotten) Poland was abusing its German population somewhat (far more than anything Ukraine has ever done to its Russian-speaking population). But Hitler's claims of the extent of such abuses were wildly exaggerated and overdrawn. Just as the depiction above of Ukraine "crushing those Russians because of their dissent" (without providing specifics) is wildly out of touch with reality.
And his stated rationale of the need to to start a full-scale war in order "protect" this population was a big lie of course, created specifically to appeal to people gullible enough to believe such things. Putin's claims of the need to "protect" the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine are equally baseless, and are designed with a similar intent in mind.
But what I do expect is to engage with their people and their neighbors on these issues in hopes of avoiding war and maintaining territorial integrity.
Ukraine did engage with Russia on the issues -- they just weren't willing to bend over and give Putin everything he wanted. More specifically it definitely sounds like you were expecting the Ukrainians to agree to permanent large-scale territorial concessions. Because since 2014, that's been the bare minimum of Russia's terms for "avoiding war".
If we dismiss everything the Russians say and accept everything said by those arming Ukraine there is no point for debate on this topic: we can only accept the mainstream media narrative that Ukraine must fight and we must support it endlessly.
All I can say is we had similar situations in the past and decades after the fact we realized we were lied to. Too bad millions died I guess?
If you listen to Russians, then you're left with an impression that they are being surrounded by US weapons on their borders. If you look at the numbers, then that turns out to be a blatant misrepresentation of truth. For example, the US fielded ~5000 main battle tanks in Europe at the end of the Cold War. In 2013, the last 10 were removed. The opposite is true: post-Cold War era has brought rapid disarmament to Europe, which has emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine, because disarmament has limited how much and how quickly allies could help Ukraine.
> But I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
Ironically, this is "obvious" only if you accept the premise that Russia is determined to violate the security of its neighbors.
But to address one aspect of what you're saying now:
I think it’s kind of obvious that the core Russian desire is to keep nato far from its borders.
This is broadly correct, and perfectly understandable.
However the war was never really about NATO expansion in the first place. And even if it were -- it definitely wasn't a rational response to that concern. And it certainly wasn't a response that the current regime was "pushed" into in any meaningful sense (as would seem to be youre implication here).
It's really upsetting to hear something so dehumanizing, have you ever interacted with russian people? would you say this about any other massive group of people?
Unfortunately EU and US governments are not much better since they all put dumb limits on weapons usage and never supplied Ukraine enough weapons to actually get any superiority.
Intelligence operative or peasant. Pick one.